“This may sound weird but I never considered myself a great player,” he said. “I made myself, along with my teammates, a better player than I was. I never thought I was a superstar. I worked like I was a hungry man going for the first game in the big leagues . . . There was a lot of work for me to do to have success.”

I guess that’s more properly read as him not considering himself a natural talent, but even that seems like insanely irrational modesty. He’s one of the greatest any of us has ever seen.

I want to be mad at this post, but I cant. If you are even pretending that Pedro isnt a hall-of-famer that had 2-3 of the best pitching seasons ever then I can only be impressed at the sheer level of trolling or of self delusion. Its remarkable really

I dunno. His desire to prove a point in that memorable 1999 all-star game where he struck out 5/6 batters he faced including larkin, walker, sosa, mcgwire and bagwell sure seemed like to me he wanted to show he was better than those guys, even without the steroid cloud. You have to have amazing confidence in your ability as a superstar talent to go into a game against that lineup like that.

The narrative leading up to this series against the Angels was “Mo Vaughn returns to face his old team!” By the third inning that had changed to “Holy crap Pedro is mowing them down!” 8 innings, no runs, 15 strikeouts, no walks. For the next two years, this would pretty much be a typical Pedro pitching line.

I know you would like to think that Pedro started his historic run with the Red Sox, but he did win the Cy Young the year he left Montreal with a pretty good 17-8 record, 1.90 ERA and he led the league with 13 complete games. He threw 241 innings and K’d 305. He was pretty much a beast from 97-03

A lot of very talented people don’t believe they’re that good at what they do (except Muhammad Ali)–perhaps perfectionism is in the mix, but this can be what helps people to strive to be better and work harder.